As promised, I wanted to scribble a few lines about the loss of Justice Scalia and the consequent shit-storm that has engulfed our nation’s political landscape. I’m sure that most of your conservative friends have shared 10 and 20-year-old speeches by Chuck Schumer and Joe Biden as support for the insupportable position taken by the G.O.P. leadership in the Senate. You could do worse than to remind them that (1) both of those speeches were made in a year when there was no vacancy on the court, and (2) both speeches came something like a year after extremist justices were appointed by a Republican president and approved by the Senate without filibuster – in the case of Biden’s speech, it was Clarence Thomas, who was approved by a Democratic controlled Senate. (Though it’s hard to tell because he’s so deathly quiet, Thomas is to the right of their sainted Scalia.)
All that said, Obama’s natural inclination will be to offer an olive-branch appointment, something like the one he trial-ballooned this week, namely the Republican governor of Nevada. Seriously … what is it with this president’s Pangloss-like insistence on attempting to curry favor with the Republicans? Hasn’t he been burned enough times in the last seven years? He’s like freaking Charlie Brown trying to kick the football again. Earth to Obama: they hate everything you want to do … doesn’t matter what it is. Best to nominate someone that might energize the Democratic base for the upcoming election; make the point that the election is, in substantial measure, about this issue. It’s about a lot of things, but the Supreme Court is a biggie.
The remaining G.O.P. candidates discussed this during the CNN debate on Thursday night. I say “discussed”, though it was more a pissing contest. Apparently John Roberts is now too liberal for Donald Trump’s taste. I wish I could say that this food-fight was the worst display of the entire debate, but that’s not even close to being true. Anyone watching was treated to a rehash of John McCain’s health plan (i.e. let insurance companies sell their products across state lines), resurrection of the ultimate neocon foreign policy (apparently Marco Rubio is now the little tin car Bill Kristol drives around in), and rabid celebration of trickle-down economics. And a lot of good yelling and screaming, of course.
One thing’s for certain, people … if anyone on that stage in Texas gets anywhere near the White House, don’t buy any green bananas. You’d just be throwing your money away.
luv u,
jp
I think one advantage Bernie may have is that he is making a case for something different than the status quo. His presidency would not be a third Obama term, whereas from the sound of Hillary (and what we know of how the Clintons govern), we would have continuity under her guiding hand.
Who’s the moderate in that race? Christie? Don’t say Christie. He’s vehemently anti choice, wants to provoke war with Russia, and has all the racial sensitivity of Nixon during his drunk period (to say nothing of being a shill for the Peterson Institute, which advocates for privatizing Social Security). Forget Jeb Bush. He’s easily as bad as his brother on the issues, only with less raw political talent. Rubio? He’s the bold “young” candidate who seems to have his head stuck in decades-old Cold War strategy like a bug in amber. Frankly, any one of these candidates would be an unmitigated disaster as president.
I won’t run through the particulars of the story. For that, I suggest you listen to the podcast. Suffice to say that Bergdahl suffered grievously over his five years as a guest of the Taliban. He attempted to escape several times, once for as long as nine days, escaping barefoot into the Hindu Kush, injuring himself severely, eating grass, etc. He was beaten badly, cut with razors, kept in a cage not fit for a chimp, threatened with beheading – you name it. He was the first P.O.W. held for anything like this long since the Vietnam War, and under conditions that rival any horror stories from that conflict. Frankly, it’s a testament to his physical and mental strength that he survived.
The Cuban exile policy is the perfect illustration of what these GOP pols complain about with regard to incentivizing the influx of undocumented immigrants, and yet they have no problem with folks flocking here from Cuba because they can’t earn a lot of money back home. But when it comes to families running for their lives from the hell holes we helped destroy during the 1980s, that’s different. If the likes of Cruz and Rubio had had their way, Cuba would be a free market basket case like El Salvador, Guatemala, Honduras, Mexico, and every other disaster area we “helped” over the years. Of course, then the legions of exiles fleeing drug gangs would find no red carpet on these shores.
Capitalism’s Failure. This is an issue that touches on everyone, young and old, working and unemployed or retired, poor and not-so-poor. The internal contradictions of American and, by extension, global capitalism came to a head in the crash of 2008, and we are still living in the aftermath of that disaster. Yes, the government can point to select data points that indicated a modest level of recovery, but the fact remains that an economic system that has consistently failed the vast majority of the population over the past 30 years has entered into an entirely new phase of failure. Most working Americans are toiling at the only job they can find, earning an inadequate rate of compensation. Our major cities are choked with legions of homeless people. This system is broken; it only serves the top one percent. We need to take a hard look at this, sooner rather than later.
Lindsey loves Georgie. At the kid’s table, Lindsey Graham got a little carried away over his bro-mance with ex-president and hopefully future convicted war criminal George W. Bush, saying in essence that he misses W and wishes he were still in office to handle the big-as-the-sky threat known as ISIS, which Lindsey previously said wants to “kill us all!!” Not hard to work out why Senator Graham’s poll numbers, even in a highly reactionary GOP primary race, hover somewhere between zero and zero point five. Not a majority position.
This is what happens in America when anything like a foreign-inspired terror attack takes place: we want to corral all Muslims and start bombing some country most of us couldn’t find on a globe with both hands. I’ve lived through many cycles of this, from the Iran hostage crisis through the first gulf war, to the embassy bombings in the late 1990s and on into the 9/11 era. I can remember a Muslim friend from Bosnia being a bit taken aback by the rhetoric and the kind of full-on nationalism pushed through the corporate media that came about after Clinton bombed Iraq in 1998. It’s times like these when Muslims – and yes, people with beards and headscarves more generally – feel compelled to start looking over their shoulders.
The thing is, Trump is a mirror to the Republican base, as 
My life isn’t exactly typical, but my family experience offers some insight into the depth of white privilege. My dad came back from World War II, got his high school equivalency diploma, and went to work. He was white, so it wasn’t that challenging to find a job in those days. He had V.A. and F.H.A. loans, barred to black families, with which to purchase his first, second, third house and so on. By the late sixties / early seventies, we were living in a new house in the richest town in our county, with one son on the way to Oberlin College, all on one salary. Dad’s financial profile more or less tracked the trajectory of the American white working class, declining somewhat through the seventies, eighties, and nineties, but he left enough to fund an IRA and, with Social Security, set my mom up for the rest of her life. Black families, by and large, didn’t have any of that – not the jobs, not the equity, not the access to credit, an not the freedom to live wherever they wanted.